Ten days ago I published an update the MyWhoosh Workouts section which you can read about there. A couple of things I flagged there were:
- showing the number of workouts available in any given category
- grouping together intervals for workouts that have repeats
Both of those changes are now live.
But oh my days, was one of them harder than expected.
And it’s pretty crazy how much work went on in between the previous update and today, as the overall end result isn’t that striking.
Workout Numbers Per Category
OK – so the easier of the two, showing the number of workouts available in a given category. Here’s what it did look like:
And here’s what it looks like from today:
Each workout category now lists the number of available workouts in that category. Pretty basic stuff, but a useful addition.
I was going to add more in here, but I don’t (yet) know what else would be useful to display. There is always a tendency to add more stuff… but if it’s not providing any useful value, what’s the point?
If you can think of something extra that’s worth showing here, I’m open to suggestions, so please do leave a comment.
Also, I added a link to the ‘full’ workout list. That’s the original list I launched back at the very start of February, with a slight visual update.
Grouping Repeat Intervals
Now, the harder of the two.
And by harder I mean – wow, that is where the 10 days and many, many hours worth of thought and experimentation went.
This was a really, really hard problem to solve. At least for me, for I am no coding genius.
Sadly, in pulling together a few examples to show on this post, I have discovered it’s not quite perfect. But hey, it was definitely good enough to deploy, so that’s something.
Here’s an example:
I think you would agree with me that, as a human, you would see four distinctive repeated blocks here.
We start with the warm up / ramp up, a bit of tempo, and then – open to interpretation – we kick off an interval with some endurance work, into a ramp from tempo to threshold, and then repeat that four times.
We end with another block of tempo work, followed by the cool down.
Now, as I say, this is open to interpretation. Do intervals begin at anything above endurance, or should endurance be an indication that an interval begins?
What do I mean?
vs
Mentally I’m kinda more in the second camp when I’m on the bike.
But trying to code that was even harder than what was already a very hard exercise. So right now, any repeat begins at endurance – or more formally, anything above recovery constitutes a new interval block.
That means the graph above becomes:
Which shows that the middle section repeats four times.
So that’s how it is at the moment.
And as I say, when I was pulling this post together, I noticed some bugs. But also some interesting things which I want to call out first.
On February 3rd I updated the workout display and the screenshot I added to show this was:
I can’t actually remember what was causing the ‘3 errors‘ display. I’ve not seen that in a while so I must have fixed it somehow.
But on that page we had the workout intervals breakdown at the side.
And here’s that same page today:
Which might be a little small to see, but there’s a couple of interesting things to call out.
The first – most obvious from the current topic – is that the workout intervals table on the left there didn’t seem to shrink / show repeats, but visually it looks like there are three clearly repeating patterns in the graph.
Why is that?
Well, it turns out cadence is a thing:
When I added the cadence information – which was originally not displayed – it became clear why the three apparently repeating sections had not collapsed into one repeated group.
So far, so good.
Perhaps less immediately obvious is the zone colourings changed very slightly between the two releases.
If you take a look at the original and the updated, focusing on the graph display, you will see that the recovery zones seemed to change to endurance.
Whoops, that was a rounding error on my part!
Zones should now not only correctly round up (as they do inside MyWhoosh), but the colours should match MyWhoosh, and the zone boundaries should also. This means, as best I recall, recovery went up from 50% FTP as I had it originally, to 55%. There may have been a couple of others that changed also, but not by 5%.
Lastly though, bugs clearly do remain:
That’s … kinda right?
Well, it’s grouped the first interval for sure, but somehow come undone because (at a guess) the gap between the first block and the second block is endurance, not recovery. I don’t know for sure, but it’s a good example of just how much trouble this code has caused me. It’s no wonder most other sites I’ve seen only group by consecutive blocks. I probably bit off far more than I could chew.
Also generally I feel like it just looks messy when there are repeats right now.
Anyway, as a heads up here is how the Trello board looks for this feature. Still work left to do:
As I said above, I am very open to comments and feedback. Just bear in mind I get like 1 hour a day on this, at most, and I’m not that clever!